A new vista for Jonatham Lethem?

OK I know that satires of Disneyland/world and of Sea World et al. are going after some low-hanging fruit, but Jonathan Lethem does a pretty good job plucking that fruit so to speak in his story Penging Vegan in current New Yorker - about a guy, named Espeth, a curious evocation of the name of the detective in Lethem's most famous work, Motherless Brooklyn?, who is coming off of some serious antidepressants without much guidance from his curiously inept therapist, and who visits Sea World with wife and twin daughters. Coming off the meds, everything looks pretty awful to him - and as we know from the recent documentary Black Fish, which the narrator name checks (actually I don't think he names it, though) the place is or an be pretty awful. So the day at Sea World is like a tour through Dante's hell. It reminded me a bit of one of D.F. Wallace's essays, about a visit to the Illinois State Fair - all pretty ghastly, and the main character or narrator being the malcontent, the one guy who seems to be utterly not enjoying himself. The story is, as expected, kind of a downer - but a few things save it from its negative, actually kind of snobbish tendencies: it's interesting to see Lethem write from TC Boyle country, a southern California sun-drenched landscaped - when he's to date seemed to be the ultimate Brooklyn writer dude. But here he bring some of his dark Brooklyn melancholia to the Golden State, and the clash is pretty good. I also give him credit for writing one of the rare stories with an actual ending - a twist that's perhaps slightly ambiguous - he has a realization that may be just from his meds withdrawal or may be a true insight, I won't give it away - and also perhaps slightly forced, but still the story actually does seem to conclude at the right spot - rare for a New Yorker story, anyway.